Just getting started, and I’m noticing that the first two systems I’ve visited have been abandoned. Is this like Adrift? I just visited the Anomaly, and it is also eerily silent, no other players visible.
Spooky, just in time for Halloween I suppose.
Question though, is there anyway to sell surplus technology modules? Without the normal merchants in space stations, I can’t think of anyway of using sentinels to farm nanites. Can’t remember from Adrift.
Good luck Travellers, I’m going to go back to drift in the void…
I’m about 1/3 in, and every system has been abandoned.
I stopped farming nanites because there wasn’t much need. I don’t need to bring in my old ship because progression is focused on corvettes and you get enough parts from awards. My multitool has already got plenty of upgrades too.
So far it seems like an easy expedition.
Have you finished at this point? How did it go?
Yeah, it was one of the quicker expeditions. Mostly straightforward, but the black hole was a nice surprise.
Yeah, this one didn’t feel too tedious. There were a couple things that slowed me down, but nothing terrible.
The rewards are pretty cool. I can already see all of the “Where did you get those corvette parts?” posts from new players.
There is no way to sell technology upgrades without NPCs. There are functional trade terminals in the stations for selling off commodities and items for units, but you can’t do anything with the upgrades except use them, discard them, or I guess schlep them back to your main save and sell them there. The payout for that is probably not worth it.
And yes, in this expedition all of the systems are indeed abandoned.
Side note, if you need nanites during the expedition and don’t feel like visiting any of the inevitable runaway mould farm bases built by other places that pop up all over the route like mushrooms every time, you can refine larval cores into 50 nanites each and basically every single building on every planet in the expedition is an abandoned one festooned with whispering eggs. Including the one you start at.
Each building has at least 16 eggs around it, and 16 larval cores equates to 800 nanites. Don’t worry about the biological horrors that spawn when you break an egg. They’re slow and stupid, and you can just gather up all the cores and then run away. In fact, running away is preferable to fighting them even if you can deal with them easily, because they don’t drop anything worthwhile and squishing them all is tedious.
Also! Stop-Having-Fun-Guys need not apply to this one:
If you feel your time is actually valuable, note that the portable refiner item duplication bug is still not patched in this update. Although I notice one small change made to the mechanics now is that you can no longer pick up a refiner whose output slot has something in it. You can still dupe anything in its input slot, though, which means all this does is slow you down slightly as you can only duplicate the cores and not the nanites directly. Still, you only need one core and two refiners to get started with and you can generate hundreds of thousands of nanites an hour easily by doing this, which ought to hold you for the entirety of the trip and then some.
I finished this expedition in one sitting today, about four or five hours. It’s much more linear than the last few. What with the lack of vendors everywhere you’re relying pretty much entirely on milestones to get the technology you need to do what you’ve got to do, so doing most of them out of order is completely impossible. None of the achievements are too tough and, as usual, enterprising scrubs have already slapped visible-from-space signposts all over the planets along the route where the specific items/creatures/biomes/etc. you need are.
Have you gone back and visited the systems now that you completed the Expedition? There are a couple odd changes.
System Changes
- Not all systems are abandoned now, which isn’t surprising, BUT the first couple systems in the expedition no longer have Space Stations at all. They still show up in your visited listed but if you try to teleport to them, you just end up floating in space! I’m glad you can easily call your corvette now.
- Some geography has changed. During the expedition, I dropped a Base Computer near a Monolith at the bottom of a cliffside of the water planet rendezvous. I just thought it would be a neat place to build a base over the water and up the cliffside. Now that the expedition is over, the Monolith, which wasn’t part of the expedition storyline or anything, is now gone. ☹️
I’m sure there are other changes I just haven’t noticed yet.
I just finished the expedition last night. Aside from distracting myself with corvette building, there were a couple things I ran into that delayed me getting done sooner.
Expedition Tips
- Finding an Infested Planet - While the Vile Brood can be found on several planets along the way, Infested planets are a lot less obvious. In fact, there may only be one in the expedition and it’s Giumf VII in the Rendezvous 3 system. “Infested” isn’t even in the description. I believe it says something like “Boiling Doom.”
- Spacewalking for Lost in Time - There is a spacewalk in each Phase of the expedition. 1) If you don’t turn off Multiplayer there is a good chance you will be flung away from location the moment you step out of your ship and have to fly back, likely to be flung away again. 2) After you scavenge the corvette parts from the wreckage, grab the log that is floating nearby. That is what ends the mission.
- Underwater Exploration - Later in the expedition there will be a handful of underwater tasks including deploying a Nautilon, reaching a certain depth, etc. Constructing the Nautilon Chamber requires Magnitised Ferrite, which can be tedious to refine all the way from Ferrite Dust. Early in the expedition there are planets with Magntised Ferrite deposits. Unfortunately you will also need other underwater resources like Salt, Crystal Sulphide, and Living Pearls for the various underwater upgrades and there’s no easy way to get those outside of grinding.
- Adopting an Anomalous Floating Companion - These can only be found in Purple systems and not every planet has flying animals that count. There are a couple in the Rendezvous 5 system on Gashi 69/B4 and Umazuno-Sosy, but I know other people found some in earlier Purple systems.
- Prerequisites - While you can do some missions out of order, like collecting Storm Crystals, others have prerequisites that are rewarded from earlier missions. Some of those can be easy to bypass, like exploring a derelict freighter without an Emergency Scanner. There are some systems which seem to have derelict freighter scattered around on which you can just land without needing a scanner first.
Hope that helps!
Side-note, but how does one do ‘earlier’ expeditions? I’m wondering how to get the sandworm flying animal.
You have to wait for the annual reruns, or - if you are on PC - you can use a mod (I think it is this one?) to rerun them offline
